PIECES OF HISTORY

AMONG ALL THE CURIOSITIES YOU can see on display in The Charleston Museum from Native American flint arrowheads to World War I machine guns, from Ice Age fossils to the iconic whale skeleton hanging in the lobby a grass helmet may seem rather unremarkable. It looks, in fact, more like a head of hair, fixed like a mohawk wig on a head mount, than it does a piece of armor or decoration.

But in the history of this history museum, this is no ordinary object. Believed to have come from late 18th century voyages to the Sandwich Islands (what is now Hawaii), the grass helmet somehow made its way halfway across the world to Charleston and into the hands of an elite group known as the Charleston Library Society.

The Charleston Museum celebrates 250 years as ‘America’s First Museum’

BY HASTINGS HENSEL | PHOTOS BY MIC SMITH

“In 1773, these members of the Library Society decided to found a museum to document the natural history of the province of South Carolina,” says the museum’s director, Carl Borick. “The idea was they would bring in botany examples, geologic samples, soil samples, and they would accumulate them in this museum. And the whole idea and this is where I think there’s a common thread between now and 1773 was to educate themselves about South Carolina.”

Jennifer McCormick, the museum’s chief of collections, put it this way: “When they were clearing the land for rice fields, the enslaved people were finding fossils and the planters decided they needed somewhere to put everything so they could study them.”

No doubt, at the time, their purpose was to enhance agricultural production that is, to make money for the colony and many of these elites had studied law in London, close to the British Museum. This was also the Age of Discovery, and Charleston was a bustling New World port city where novelty items flowed in and out like the tides. uu

“They set out to build a museum for the natural history of South Carolina, but by the 1790s, they’re bringing in objects from around the world,” Borick explains. “And the fact that this is one of the most important ports in the South before the Civil War contributes to the wide array of objects in the museum.”

Although the earliest collections were destroyed by a fire only five years after the founding, the Charleston Library Society still holds an accession book from 1798, which details what artifacts came into the museum. In addition to the grass helmet, it also lists two other objects still in the museum’s possession: a cassava basket and a quiver of arrows.

All three objects are on display now at the museum’s newest meta-exhibit, “America’s First Museum: 250 Years of Collecting, Preserving, and Educating,” which will run the entire year of 2023 as a kind of birthday celebration and is being billed as spanning “4.6 billion years of history.”

The sound of the mission

On the day I visit, in the Anthropocene epoch and the first quarter of the 21st century, Borick meets me beneath the whale skeleton in the lobby, where a group of school-aged field-trippers is gathering with their chaperones.

“I call it the sound of our mission,” Borick says, as excited voices reverberate off the brick walls. For many young kids, this is their first post-pandemic foray as a school group, which makes this the first true field trip of their lives.

Borick tells me he spent part of his childhood in Greenwood, “playing Francis Marion in my backyard,” and the other part of his childhood nourishing his love of history while growing up near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. After college, he worked as an accountant for three years before going back to school to get his master’s degree in history at the University of Alabama. A specialist in the Southern Campaign of the Revolutionary War, he began working as the museum’s administrative officer before moving up to assistant director in 2001 and director in 2013.

He admits that he’s “walking in the footsteps of giants,” a long list of directors who have overseen multiple changes in location, significant expansions of the collection, and even the breaking away from the College of Charleston in 1915.

“But I’ll tell you one thing I’m excited about our museum now,” he says. “We have probably the best professional staff in terms of curation, education, and facilities that we’ve ever had in the history of the museum. Honestly, that’s kind of a cool legacy for me.”

Borick credits the professionalization of Museum Studies in colleges so that now the museum can hire renowned specialists for its five curator positions in Archives, Archaeology, History, Historical Textiles, and Natural History. Each month, Borick tells me, this all-star team gathers to discuss perhaps the exciting part of museum work acquisitions, aka the getting of more stuff.

“Ninety-eight percent of what’s in our collection is either donated or is found at archaeological or paleontological digs, and the other 2% is purchased,” he says, noting that the museum has more than 2.4 million objects, most of which are in the storeroom and only available to researchers.

“With donations, we find out what we can about the piece. For instance, a quilt we might acquire, if we know that it comes from the woman’s great-great grandmother and never left the family, that’s called having good provenance.”

It’s a word that means the record of ownership, and it gives the object what’s known as “exhibit value.”

“Being in Charleston is really beneficial because a lot of families have been here since the colony was founded,” he says. “A lot of the materials have been passed down through generations.”

Time traveling

As we proceed through the museum’s exhibits a chronological flow from room to room, as though walking along a timeline Borick points out some of his favorite examples. There’s the axe head from the first 10 years of the colony (“The reason I love this so much is because this was a tool they used to essentially carve this civilization out of the wilderness,” he says); there’s the Creek pottery from northern Alabama that made its way to South Carolina on footpaths that would become our highway system; there are the slave badges and rice gates that bear witness to South Carolina’s history as a slave state; there’s the little Civil War pipe carved out as a caricature of Abraham Lincoln and the prosthetic limb a Civil War doctor fashioned from the butt of a discarded musket; there’s a cast of the world’s largest-ever flying bird, Pelagornis sandersi.

Get There

The Charleston Museum is located at 360 Meeting Street in downtown Charleston.

HOURS: Open Monday–Saturday: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday noon to 5 p.m.

ADMISSION: Tickets are $12 for adults, $10 for youths (13 to 17 years) and $5 for children (3 to 12 years). Group tour discounts are available.

DETAILS: For more information, call (843) 722-2996 or visit charlestonmuseum.org.

These are all eye-catching wonders, to be sure, but perhaps Borick’s favorite pieces are two small sweetgrass basket fragments.

“Modern sweetgrass basket weavers have looked at these from the 1790s, and the weave is the exact thing they are using today,” he says. “This is approximately 100 years after the first enslaved people are brought to South Carolina. And that technology they brought over, they still use today. What a connection to the past!”

A museum, after all, can’t simply be a mausoleum. A museum is literally a place to muse that is, to ponder and reflect upon the past. And reflection is literally double-sided. By seeing the past, Borick tells me, we see our present-day selves.

“In order to understand people’s attitudes today, you have to go back and look at the history and how we got here,” he says. “How did they wash their clothes? Where did they get their food from? How did they fight wars? Despite the fact that the technology is different, whether it’s 1780 or 1880, people still have to do the same thing. They have to work jobs; they have to eat and wear clothing. So, to me, museums really provide a fascinating window.”